Continuity as Futures Practice
Introduction
What started as a design project to create a silk pattern for a village identity shifted after early conversations with the leaders of the local weaving group in Surin Province, Northeastern Thailand. The project became a way to examine how futures are understood and practiced in everyday life. Choosing what should be woven meant choosing what would be taught, repeated, recognised, and remembered over time.
I began a small ethnography through conversations and observation to understand the silk-making ecosystem. This included tracing where silkworms came from and how they were cared for, how threads were extracted from cocoons, how the mudmee technique shaped patterns, how weaving unfolded thread by thread, and what happened once the silk left the village. Following these practices revealed silk-making as a system sustained through repetition, shared knowledge, and long-established rhythms.
Time
The silk pattern appeared as one among many artefact that shape the village’s futures. It was also an artefact created entirely within present conditions, relying on existing weaving patterns, established techniques, and familiar routines. Its relevance to the futures did not come from radical imagination or transformation, but from its capacity to sustain. The pattern formalised meanings that already existed so they could remain legible over time.
This reframed how futures appeared in the project. The future was not discussed as a distant horizon or a scenario to be reached. Even when people spoke about decades ahead, their attention stayed with present actions. Futures took shape through small decisions, negotiations, and memories. People talked about how the village would be understood later, when the current weavers might no longer be there to explain their work. Designing the silk pattern became a form of futures thinking grounded in responsibility toward that unknown moment.
One of the central motifs in the pattern references the rawiang tree, from which the village takes its name. The tree itself is no longer common in the area. Its presence now exists largely through memory and story. Designing rawiang tree into the pattern meant working with absence as a material condition.
The pattern carries meaning across a layered temporality: from a past in which the tree was present, through a present shaped by its absence, into a future where that absence may deepen. The design reflects an acceptance of absence as part of living systems and a choice to carry meaning forward despite it. This made visible a dimension of design futuring that often remains implicit: futures are shaped as much through how absence is handled as through how possibility is imagined.
Identities
As the pattern developed, it also became clear that future identity was not shared or settled within the community. Different members emphasised different priorities when speaking about what should define the village over time. Some focused on ecological references and the village’s name. Others emphasised traditions, music, histories, or the practical need for economic survival.
Economic aspiration played a visible role in these discussions. More complex patterns tend to sell at higher prices, as customers often associate complexity with value. At the same time, committing to overly complex designs might mean breaking from local techniques passed on for generations.
The silk pattern is a way of holding these different aspirations for what the village’s legacy should be together. It allowed the possibility of economic stability while remaining anchored in local practice. At the same time, meaning remained open and subject to negotiation through use. Future-oriented artefacts for people in the village do not need to stabilise meaning completely as different people interpreted and understood the pattern differently. The pattern’s role, instead, can be to sustain coherence while allowing difference to emerge and persist. Futures here appeared as cumulative adjustments rather than directional leaps.
A recurring question throughout the project was how future generations might understand where the silk came from and why it mattered. Identity became a question of how meaning might survive when its original context no longer does. Designing the pattern made that concern tangible. The pattern weaves memory, present practice, and future interpretation together. It threads continuity by shaping how meaning travels forward from the present.
Everyday Futures
Futures practice often privileges anticipation, projection, and strategic imagination. This work foregrounded a different epistemology: futures as something practiced through present commitments, repetition, and sense of community. The present emerged as the primary site where futures are enacted, rather than as a launchpad for transformation.
From this perspective, futures are shaped through decisions about what remains legible over time. Systems accumulate layers of memory, erosion, adaptation, and persistence. Design futuring engages these layers by facilitating which references endure, which practices remain teachable, and how absence is remembered.
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Note: For more details on the process and outcome, visit this page on PROONG Studio’s website.